{"id":103464,"date":"2025-08-30T17:06:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T17:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/103464\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T17:06:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T17:06:09","slug":"gianfranco-rosis-lyrical-vesuvius-portrait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/103464\/","title":{"rendered":"Gianfranco Rosi’s Lyrical Vesuvius Portrait"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tVesuvius \u2014 the very name sounds ancient, rhythmically mythical, so tied into tales of a destroyed past that one almost forgets it\u2019s still very much in the ordinary, existing present. The legendary cone doesn\u2019t exactly loom large in Gianfranco Rosi<\/a>\u2018s \u201cBelow the Clouds<\/a>,\u201d a wandering, granular documentary study of its surrounding landscape and population. Instead, it\u2019s auspiciously backgrounded, a calm but threatening variable factored into modern Neapolitan life, nearly two thousand years after it vanquished Pompeii. For some, that drastic legacy amounts to a busy, investigative livelihood, for others it feeds into everyday environmental anxieties, while for others still, it truly is ancient history. There are many ways to live around an active volcano, and this humming, keen-eyed film is interested in all of them.<\/p>\n

\n\tThough it touches on contemporary geopolitics \u2014 with conflicts in Syria and Ukraine threaded into its fraying urban tapestry \u2014 \u201cBelow the Clouds\u201d seems less bedded in current events than Rosi features like \u201cNotturno\u201d and the Oscar-nominated \u201cFire at Sea.\u201d As in those films, however, his observations of individually unremarkable days and lives do build to something larger and more societally searching. While among his warmest works, rich in pleasures of place and weather and human motion, it\u2019s no empty travelogue, notwithstanding the sometimes glistening beauty of Rosi\u2019s black-and-white cinematography. After its premiere in competition at Venice, \u201cBelow the Clouds\u201d should have little trouble following the director\u2019s other recent docs into general arthouse distribution.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe title stems from a famed Jean Cocteau quote that also opens the film: \u201cVesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.\u201d As shot by Rosi, it feels close to true. Silvery blankets of stratus hover over the streets, beaches and surrounding scrub of Naples \u2014 a city that gets a more lyrical shake here than in countless grisly-gritty Camorra dramas \u2014 while closer to Mount Vesuvius itself, fumaroles release paler breaths of volcanic gas and steam into the mix. There\u2019s manmade smoke, too, of the type that provides steady work for Naples\u2019 weary, put-upon fire department: the most prominently featured of a few municipal bodies surveyed by Rosi here, in a way that lends \u201cBelow the Clouds\u201d something of Frederick Wiseman\u2019s inside-out interest in how cities tick.<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course, there\u2019s much more than fire for them to fight. With his camera planted watchfully in the department\u2019s all-night call center, Rosi observes how a patient, grizzled chief handles crises ranging from a kitten stuck beneath a sidewalk grate to a harrowing real-time incident of violent domestic abuse, as well as one elderly repeat caller who simply wants to know the time, many times a day. They\u2019re the point of contact for perceived natural disasters, too \u2014 no Vesuvian calamities, though they\u2019re inundated with terrified calls when the region is hit with a 4.2 magnitude earthquake, the biggest in the Neapolitan area in 40 years.<\/p>\n

\n\tOut in the field, firemen are on hand to investigate uncovered tunnels and archaeological digs violated by tomb robbers, a task that segues to other authorities under the film\u2019s gaze: the police pursuing these tombaroli, a less lovable quarry here than in Alice Rohrwacher\u2019s delightful \u201cLa Chimera,\u201d and the local museums entrusted with housing and protecting fragments of history more legally pulled from the storied soil of the area. In the basement of one such institution, veteran curator Mary pores over a cavernous archive of long-buried, as-yet-unexhibited statues, artefacts and architectural remains that survived the destruction of Pompeii in 79 A.D. \u201cThese have been my friends for the last 30 years,\u201d she sighs happily, casting her flashlight over the ruins, setting their craggy details in stark relief. If you can\u2019t live in the past, you can at least live amid it. <\/p>\n

\n\tElsewhere in town, a dedicated teacher runs extra-curricular classes for children of various ages in the local library, helping them with their multiplication tables or feeding nascent literary discussion. A dustily upholstered cinema screens Rossellini\u2019s \u201cVoyage to Italy,\u201d among other locally apposite titles, to an empty house. And in the port of Torre Annunziata, a Syrian refugee is among the laborers in the towering industrial silos that are steadily filled with Ukrainian grain: The Gulf of Naples is also a limbo area for those waiting to rebuild their lives.<\/p>\n

\n\tRosi\u2019s high-contrast monochrome images seek vibrant life and beauty in a region crisscrossed with centuries of scars, though bar some breathtaking individual shots \u2014 including one of horsedrawn carts trudging across an overcast beach gleaming with morning rainfall \u2014 he isn\u2019t overly interested in postcard tableaux. A starkly experimental score by recent Oscar winner Daniel Blumberg (\u201cThe Brutalist\u201d) likewise doesn\u2019t prettify matters, mixing sparse musical instrumentation with more scientific sound-gathering devices \u2014 geophones, hydrophones \u2014 to extract the groans and reverberations of land and sea. Vesuvius may be biding its time, but it gets a voice of sorts in Rosi\u2019s intricate exploration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vesuvius \u2014 the very name sounds ancient, rhythmically mythical, so tied into tales of a destroyed past that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[50384,96,50385,2839,56,54,55,10306],"class_list":["post-103464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-below-the-clouds","tag-entertainment","tag-gianfranco-rosi","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-venice-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}